| Becoming Caring Christian solutions to life's tough problems Programs of Family Life, Personal & Spiritual Growth, Study Skills, & Educational Enrichment 600 North 7th Street Crockett, TX 75835 |
| Understanding Faith |
I have touched briefly on the meaning of faith, but the subject demands further treatment. Let us again suppose that I am in Appleville doing business, living in a motel, and writing letters to my wife. Why do I bother to do any of this? In fact, why bother to get out of bed each morning? Perhaps necessity dictates that I earn money. Money is, after all, the power to buy food, purchase medical care, and obtain shelter. Why? No matter the answer given, a person can always again ask, "Why?" The word why is a word searching for a cause, a reason, or a purpose (i.e., a word searching for meaning). However, the word why also involves us in infinite regress, just as previously discussed with the epistemological question. My point is simply this: I would not get out of bed, dress, and call on a potential customer without faith. I must believe (enough to get out of bed) that I might make a sale; believe (enough to dress) that making a sale is worthwhile; and believe (enough to show up for the appointment) that my product or service meets a need. Like the air we breath, faith/belief/trust is a given so basic and necessary that we notice only its absence. The words faith, belief, and trust will be used interchangeably in this section, based on the New Testament usage of the Greek (pisteuo). See John 3:16 where the word translated "belief" also carries the meaning of "trust" and "faith in." Any use of words faith, belief, or trust in this section is consciously derived from pisteuo. Suppose I receive a telephone call while in Appleville: my wife and child have been killed in car accident. Disbelief and a sense of unreality will give way over time to other predictable stages of grief. However, as I try to adjust to the loss, a crisis of faith occurs: Why should I try? Is life worth the effort? In other words, my absence of faith makes getting out of bed, dressing for the day, and keeping my appointments more difficult. While depression will be a factor (an expected stage of grief), the negative automatic thoughts are more difficult to deal with because they contain some truth. To the extent my wife and child were a large part of my motivation for working, their loss removes a major reason for working (i.e. the why has been erased). Even with antidepressants to restore the brain chemistry to normal in order to think clearly, the question must be answered. Solving my crisis of faith is a large part of overcoming the depression so that I no longer need medication.[27] In a crisis of faith, my belief system shatters, and my ability to trust evaporates. A complete loss of faith means that I would not get out of bed, dress for the day, or bother to work. Even allowing for grief and the depression that accompanies grief, the illustration still stands. A clinical depression may so affect the brain chemistry that an act of the will cannot be carried out. However, some faith is necessary to seek treatment in the midst of the depression, to take medication, and to look at the distorted cognitive patterns that contribute to the ongoing depression. While depression and/or grief may be involved in a crisis of faith, a crisis of faith can occur without depression or grief. The instinct for life is a biological given, and infants trust as a given. A normal human being leaves infancy with some ability to trust and with a belief that his/her life is worth living. We have faith in ourselves, in others, in the future, in resources that are out there to be discovered. On the other hand, abusive parents damage children and affect a developing child's ability to trust. We all experience negative events in life that modify our ability to trust. By the time we are adults, our absolute faith (trust) has been adjusted by reason (not all people are trustworthy) or by negative conditioning (we cannot trust). Certainly, we cannot extend absolute trust to all people and should not extend absolute, unthinking trust to any person. Bad things happen to good people. Life often is not fair. The unselfconscious trust of the newborn is neither possible nor desirable for the adult. Faith does not come in a neatly wrapped package that either contains faith or is empty (i.e., you have faith, or you do not have faith). Faith is better understood functionally, like fuel for a car or money in the bank. How much faith does it take to get married? Enough to show up at the ceremony. How much faith does it take to stay married? Enough not to file for a divorce. Suppose while in Appleville I am experimenting with a self- motivational technique: If I just believe hard enough, I will make the sale. I pump myself up, think positively, go in, and fail to make the sale. Later, I receive the word that my wife and child have been killed in the car wreck. I fall back on my extreme notion of positive thinking and believe as hard as I can that the message is a mistake. Irrationally, I may desperately believe (try hard, exclude doubt) that they will come back to life. Again, I am disappointed. What is the problem? The problem lies in defining faith as mental assent to a proposition that ignores probability. I am more likely to make the sale if I make the call. I am more likely to make the sale if I believe my product is worthwhile. I am more likely to make the sale if I have confidence in myself. However, the key is probability, not certainty. As we have discussed before, we do not want to confuse the thought with objective reality. Anyone receiving word that his wife and child have died in a car wreck will experience denial, rationalization, bargaining, and other documented reactions of grief. However, ignoring the existential problems inherent in such a message, one might ask how improbable is it that the message is wrong. Once the message is accepted, the probabilities of someone returning to life are remote. In other words, any definition of faith that means that the thoughts in my mind will negate the laws of nature (gravity, for example) is misguided. I believe in miracles, not magic. Magic defies the laws of nature while miracles are the improbable. However, if the Mind of God is the Ground of Being/Reality, and if Mind (Energy) can become matter, ramifications for the concept of miracle exist without violating laws of nature (suspending gravity, for example). The question then becomes slightly different: Does (rather than can) God intervene? Even if we allow that approach in a discussion of miracle, it seems to me that the evidence is that God seldom intervenes in the laws of nature and/or in the consequences of cause/effect, including the consequences of human choices. In other words, I reject the “God of the gaps” theory: If we understand something, God has nothing to do with it; if we do not understand something, God did it. In our modern scientific world, we understand increasingly, so such an erroneous view pushes God out of the universe though a faulty definition. My working hypothesis is that all exists in the Mind of God, including the laws of nature. Panentheism seems more likely to meet the criteria of orthodox theology: God is both immanent and transcendent. Panentheism identifies God with nature while at the same moment insisting that God is more than nature and cannot be limited to nature. Also, remember the discussion about different lenses (cognitive patterns) viewing reality: To explain something psychologically (the psychological lens) is to explain one view (cognitive pattern) of the reality and does not prevent the sociological or spiritual lens from viewing the same reality. For example, consider the same reality viewed through the lens of the eye rather than the lens of a microscope or the lens of a powerful telescope. Reductionism (insisting that one view of reality is the only or most important view of reality) would be like arguing that only the view from a telescope is true. Let us say that I have overcome the first shock of learning that my wife and child have been killed in a car accident. The moment I get in my car and drive home after receiving the news of the deaths, I am exercising faith (belief, trust) in that I believe (as naturally as I breathe) that going home is worthwhile. Thus, faith is a given in existence as much as air is a given in biological life. Faith is not believing the impossible. Faith is not a magic talisman that defies the law of probability or the laws of nature (gravity, for example). Yet, faith does work wonders. The desire to fly appeared in ancient stories and elicited attempts. Many attempts to fly failed before the first successful flying machine demonstrated a workable method. Belief/faith/trust was the given behind the efforts, whether consciously related to God or not. We now routinely enter airliners and fly across the country or around the world. The law of gravity never ceased, but a flying machine applied other laws of nature to create flight. Once, when I was a student, I read the passage in the Bible about faith moving mountains and decided to experiment.[28] I picked up a rock from the road and placed it on my desk. Every day when I sat down at the desk, I concentrated on the rock and believed with all my might that the rock would move. The experiment continued for some time until one day, in disgust, I felt completely silly. I picked up the rock and moved it out of the way. In that instant, I realized that the rock had moved from the experimental spot. I laughed at my silliness, but I had to admit that the rock had moved. Faith (as the given in existence) moved the rock: I never doubted my ability to pick up the rock and move it out of the way. Faith is the given in every action; without faith, we do not act. Even if one does not have enough faith to continue in a marriage, one has faith that a divorce will be better or no action will occur. During college, I experimented with a prayer journal. Every day I would list my prayer requests (often selfish and rather silly) in the journal, and at least once a month I would go back over the written requests and check for answers. I tried to state each request in a way that could be objectively verified. I learned that answers to prayer often occurred naturally. In other words, many times I would not notice the answer until I was forced to write a notation beside the statement that verified the request had been fulfilled. Thus I learned that God answers many prayers through natural means: a friend, an effort on our part, a coincidence. People who are proponents of goal setting report that writing down a goal increases the probability of reaching the goal (as if by magic). However, that only proves my point: Faith is a given whether stated in religious or secular terms. In addition, I refuse to remove God from the universe: An observation stated without reference to God does not prove the absence of God. Indeed, in God we live and move and have our being.[29] Of course, moments occurred in which I realized that some answer defied the laws of probability. In those moments, I experienced awe. I also learned that God loved the person next to me as much as God loved me, for many delayed answers occurred only when events came together to the good of everyone involved. On the other hand, to some requests I had to write "no" as the notation, the requests remaining unanswered after a reasonable time. Let me clarify my understanding of prayer. Briefly, to me prayer is communion with God in which one focuses on God and may receive (through one’s own mind) insight, direction, and a sense of Presence. I pray for people, but in the sense of placing them in God’s loving care. I pray for guidance in order to be open to God. A prayer of faith to me is an act of trust in which I acknowledge my limited power and choose to trust that the universe is friendly.[30] I do not believe that I can love anyone more than God loves him/her, so my prayer of faith is surrendering the person to God. Prayer is certainly not making an unwilling God do something because I believe hard enough.[31] Faith that focuses on God creates a center from which all else radiates. Being centered on God changes our perception. Faith is trusting God, the God we know and the Mystery we do not know. Faith is choosing to believe that life is worth living and that people are worth loving. Faith is believing that we are loved by a heavenly father. Let us consider for a moment Feuerbach's often uncritically accepted projection argument. The argument that God is only a projection of human traits on a cosmic screen by a human mind is not to be completely ignored, for our mind is always involved in any perception of God, even if we encounter God. However, I see no reason to lift Feuerbach to sainthood even if Freud and Marx did swallow whole his projection idea and surround it with a pseudoscientific glow. Besides, the argument cuts both ways: The notion that one person projects a loving Father on the cosmic screen must be balanced by the possibility that an unbeliever is only projecting an absent or cruel parent onto the cosmic screen. If we are going to reduce the whole idea of God to human traits projected on a cosmic screen by a human mind, we at best have a stalemate. Besides, one could start the projection argument at the opposite pole and suggest that the human mind is only a projection of the Divine Mind, Energy taking on material form in creation. People often ask me what I believe about death, and I can only tell them the God I trust daily with my life is the God I trust with my death. I know the proclamation of the gospel, but I cannot escape the epistemological question. The God I experience comes to me through the Christian gospel and symbols; thus, God comes to me though a cognitive pattern with resulting perceptions as I look at reality/Reality. I am a Christian trying to understand his faith/belief/trust in God. However, I allow the blind man next to me to witness to the elephant he experiences, and I am willing to grant that the elephant may be larger than my experience. ____________________ [27] Depression, of course, has various causes, including genetic predispositions that require continuing medication. We will discuss the relationship of automatic thoughts and negative emotions in more depth later. [28] See Matthew 21:21. [29] Acts 17:28. [30] See Matthew 6:26-32. [31] See also Romans 8:26-28. (C) 2004, Don Mize |